Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

fingers, tiny and raised. I pick it up by the small end. The closer I look, the more I can see yellow underneath all the other colors. There are two grayish knots sticking out and into the pads of my fingers. I do not understand them as bone, like mine.

There is a correct order to what I’m about to do. I look to Mom. She is young and beautiful and still happy. She points at the bowl of orange, eggy swirls. I dip the chicken in. It is colder than I expect, and the egg drips in strangely strong tendrils. Next is the bowl of flour, speckled with reds and blacks of spice. I drop the chicken leg into the white powder. It makes a muted thud, and flour jumps from the bowl onto the counter. I roll the leg around, feeling the slipping drippy egg catch the soft flour. It makes a sticky sludge that coats my fingers as well as the chicken leg. And I rub my fingertips back and forth, delighting in the slick globs. What is more satisfying than a good mess? The next step is to place it on a plate, full of pieces of already flour-muddied chicken, but I see the big black cast-iron pan. It is deep with bubbling grease that looks awfully busy reaching into the air. I want to do the next part too, and badly. I wait until Mom isn’t looking. My hand hovers over the pan. The gurgle of grease is hypnotic. I drop my creation into the liquid, and then I scream. Before I even recognize the pain, I hear my voice. Spots of purple-red on sickly yellow are appearing on my leg and arm, like the welts left on the raw chicken’s flesh.

This image, these colors, were brought back to me when I saw Dad’s leg for the first time, a couple of weeks after the accident. The scar, still inflamed, ran in a thick, jagged line up his calf and shone violet mixed with the sickly yellow of a bad storm sky. The same primordial aura as the bloody fluid on the foam tray of a pack of Tyson chicken legs or the blood that puddled in muddy pools from the deer that Dora’s dad skinned. I’ve framed the wreck as a disaster, but they were lucky. Thank God they weren’t in Dad’s pickup truck, which had about the same minimal heft of our rusted swing set in the backyard. Dad spent eight days in the hospital in Tennessee. His leg was broken in seven places, the shin and ankle nearly crushed. There was talk of amputation, but in the end he had a metal plate put in his leg, to support the remaining bone, held into place by two dozen screws. The station wagon was totaled. In one of our many moves when I was in high school, I came across a Polaroid of it in the junkyard, an insurance snap maybe used in the court case against the truck driver. He’d been driving for days without a rest, popping pills to meet schedules. When his rig came to a stop, one dead and an interstate shut down completely, he hopped out of the cab and fled the scene on foot, leaving his son, who was about my age, alone in the passenger’s seat.

Mom flew home a few days after the wreck. She limped out of baggage claim with crutches and a leg brace that extended from shin to thigh, with a little circle cut out over her kneecap. By some miracle, she’d only managed to tear some cartilage in her knee. Dad was driven home by a cousin. What followed was a period I hold as one of particular closeness to Dad, though the wreck must have been one of the worst things of his life. He was essentially bedridden, until he could walk with a cane. After the cast came off, he had a gel-filled boot he kept on his leg, the left one. He just wouldn’t get out of bed. So we played cards. Not the poker he’d taught all of us in late-night sessions around the miniature blue Playskool table. Texas Hold’em, five-card stud. We counted our ante in Cheerios and Froot Loops. I spent hours practicing waterfall shuffles with decks as big as my hands. “Deal to the left,” Dad instructed, wearing the white-banded visor whose clear green bill had a milky white scar where the plastic had been folded. I counted in clumsy swipes till we all had a hand. “Now, ante up,” he’d say, as excited to win a pot of breakfast cereal as the clinking color chips we were taught to play with later.

“Mark, I wish you wouldn’t smoke in here,” Mom said from the couch or the kitchen at some point, to which Dad would apologize in good humor, “I’m sorry, honey,” if he was winning or give an aggravated wave if he was not, in neither case putting his cigarette out.

“Too rich for my blood.” I’d throw down the lingo as casually as I would fistfuls of Cheerios, just as he did, folding when I couldn’t make a decent hand.

“One-eyed jacks are wild,” I called if I was dealing, “and aces are low.” The only hand you didn’t want was aces over eights. Bad luck. Nothing so serious or important as luck to gamblers.

“It’s the dead man’s hand, kids,” Dad said. “The hand that old Wild Bill Hickok played when somebody shot him in the back of the head.”

Once the father of a neighborhood boy came to our door and demanded to speak to Dad. “You been teachin’ my boy to gamble?” the prudish redneck grumbled. And my dad answered, “So what? He ain’t any good at it, anyway.” In some retellings of this incident, punches are thrown in the doorway, but in most, only the words are felt worth remembering. It was Nana’s side of the family who dealt stories, that Dad claimed more